Doug Kelly: The Importance of Creationism

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Kelly’s excellent work“Creation and Change: Genesis1.1 –2.4 In the Light of Changing Paradigms” (Mentor ).

“An understanding of the doctrine of creation helps us to see that the Holy Bible is to be taken seriously when it speaks to the real world.

If we avoid dealing with what the Bible says about creation of the material universe, then there is a tendency for religion to be disconnected from the real world, or, to change the figure, there is a tendency to put Scripture and Christianity into a stained-glass closet that does not impact the space/time realm.

Scottish theologian, James Denney, made this point in the late 1890’s: ‘The separation of the religious and the scientific means in the end the separation of the religious and the true; and this means that religion dies among true men.’ Instead, if the church does seriously address creation, people immediately perceive that God is interacting with the real word where they live, in history, space, and time. The result is that the Bible can become very important to their daily life and to their personal destiny.

In other words, the doctrine of creation with which God’s Word begins is foundational because God starts here. It teaches that since God is the fountain of all reality, then His Word applies to our everyday life. To assume that the early chapters of Genesis are just ‘religious’ (and thus take the viewpoint of the origins of the world from unbelieving varieties of philosophy) is to relegate the Bible and ‘religion’ to the realm of the unimportant and the unreal, and eventually empty the churches since they are no longer thought to deal with actual truth. This is what happened in much of Europe in the nineteenth century (and America in the twentieth), as Michael Denton (not a professing Christian) has suggested in his recent critique of evolution (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler & Adler:Bethesda, MD.).”